Scheduling meetings in distance learning

Abstract

Peer-to-peer technique becomes mature gradually, and multiple domain-involved applications emerge, such as IPTV, distance learning, chatting network. In the context of distance learning, small scale of teachers would serve large scale of geographically located students. Normally, knowledge points are associated with different difficulty levels. And students usually are interested in varied subsets of knowledge points. Also teachers are capable of serving knowledge point subsets. The objective to schedule meeting among students and teachers according to their respective interests and capabilities is to reduce total learning duration. After formulating meeting schedule as Integer Programming problem, this paper proposes three heuristic algorithms to approximate the optimal solution. To the best of our knowledge, such problem is firstly investigated in distance learning context. Performance evaluation demonstrates their behaviors and PKPA algorithm excels two others substantially. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.